Generation V Read Free Page B

the futon until my body finally gave out at the end of
The Maltese Falcon
. I failed on both counts—my subconscious subjected me to a walk down my worst memory lane, and Larry managed to come in and leave again without waking me up. My own alarm clock was muffled enough by the dividing wall that I didn’t even get up on time, and ended up at work late, groggy, and with a really frightening case of bed head. Even by the standards of a job that at its best always carried the strong whiff of despair, failure, and burned coffee beans, the day was horrible. Jeanine was fuming over Chivalry’s failure to make the expected bootie call, and the few morning customers who were old enough to still buy a coffee and a newspaper were irate over the delay in their schedule, since I’m the one who always sets out the papers and Jeanine hadn’t bothered. After several lectures from octogenarians about the lack of work ethic inherent in my generation of whippersnappers, Tamara showed up even later than me and took increasingly longer cigarette breaks that finally culminated in her just never coming back, and the combinationof insufficient sleep and dread over the evening’s plans caused me to screw up almost every order I took, plus spill coffee on myself a grand total of three times. By the time my shift was finally grinding to a halt, Jeanine subjected me to a screaming fit that several loyal customers captured on their iPhones, and was being uploaded to YouTube before I even managed to head out the door.
    I missed my usual bus, which left me with the unappealing choice of waiting twenty-eight minutes for the next one or spending roughly the same amount of time walking home. I’m normally a huge fan of sitting still for long periods of time. My degree, after all, is really just a glorified justification of my love of spending all day watching TV. But today I walked, and was subjected to the dubious distinction of seeing my bus beat me to my stop by about thirty seconds.
    Larry was home when I entered the apartment, as evidenced by the sounds of thumping bass and squeaking mattress coils emanating through his bedroom door. After spending the last few days trying to corner him long enough to make my latest plea for rent money, it was frustrating, but also nothing less than I expected. I’m not much for believing in a higher power, but sometimes it’s tempting to believe that a strange and mysterious force likes to fuck around with my life. Besides my family, that is.
    Dinners at my mother’s are typically formal dress events. When I was younger this meant a full three-piece suit, as if I were a prepubescent ring bearer at a wedding, but as I got older I started pushing against that line a bit, and had slowly worn my way down to business casual. Iwas fairly sure that it burned Chivalry’s retinas every time he saw me show up dressed in the Gap’s end-of-season sale stuff, but it was the small things that made my visits there livable. Besides, it wasn’t as if I actually could afford anything fancier.
    After a quick shower and enough hair gel that I looked like I was on my way to a high school prom in New Jersey, I hauled on a pair of relatively clean khakis and a collared green dress shirt. I was still buttoning up my shirt as I put the key in the ignition of my car.
    “Good car, nice car, pretty car,” I said to it, patting the dashboard with my left hand while I turned the key with my right. The engine gave a sulky little grumble as it tried and failed to turn over. I turned the key a second time, and this time the engine caught. This had been my car since high school, bought with the money I’d saved up by busing tables at a neighborhood Greek restaurant, and while its engine was getting progressively crankier, and its body was now so eaten away by rust that the best I could do was periodically slap on some extra body putty and hope for the best, it had yet to let me down. Of course, every time I said that to someone who had